Chinese phonemaker Huawei is trying to turn the tables on rivals such as OnePlus by offering features of flagship smartphones in the new Honor 8 Pro without crossing the Rs30,000 price mark. It will be available at Rs 29,999 on Amazon.in from 10 July for Prime subscribers. Open sale starts on 13 July, 2017. Here are the highlights of the Honor 8 Pro and how they compare with the OnePlus 5, which is selling at a starting price of Rs 32,999.

Metal body, slightly hefty

The Honor smartphone has a metallic exterior and it comes in two attractive colours—pearl white and navy blue. It tips the scales at 184g, while the OnePlus 5, which comes in midnight black and slate grey colours, weighs just 153g. The other notable difference is the position of the finger print sensor. In the Honor 8 Pro, it is placed on the back, while in case of the rival it is integrated with the non-clickable Home button on the front panel.

Sharper and bigger canvas

The Honor 8 Pro marks a major leap for Huawei’s mid-range smartphones when it comes to display quality. Not only it offers a higher resolution of 2,560x1,440p and pixel density of 515ppi, but comes with a fairly bigger 5.7-inch display too. The OnePlus 5 has a 5.5-inch screen with resolution of 1,920x1,080p and pixel density of 401ppi. But it uses Gorilla Glass 5 which is more rugged and can survive drops form height of 1.6 metres compared to the Gorilla Glass 3 on the Honor 8 Pro.

Custom UI vs plain Android

It runs Android (7.0) Nougat with Emotion UI 5.1 on top. It is a typical Chinese phone UI, but offers lots of cool features, customisation options, and beautiful wallpapers. The OnePlus 5 runs the latest version (7.1) of Android Nougat, with OxygenOS on it. It is based on stock Android and has very few customisation options compared to the Emotion UI.

Another giant

Driving the smartphone is Huawei’s own Hi-Silcon Kirin 960 octa-core chipset which is based on 16-nanometer architecture and has four ARM A73 CPU cores and four A53 CPU cores. According to benchmark software Geekbench, it is almost at par with the OnePlus 5’s Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 octa-core chip which is based on 10-nanometer architecture and has 8 Kyro 280 CPU cores. Huawei has clubbed the Kirin 960 with 6GB RAM and is offering 128GB internal storage which is expandable to another 128GB via microSD card. This not only makes it equipped for future but also puts it at par with the OnePlus 5 which offers 6GB RAM in the 64GB storage model. The 128GB variant which comes with 8GB RAM costs Rs 37,999. At that price, it is way out of the flagship killer territory.

Bigger battery doesn’t always mean better backup

It packs in a 4,000mAh battery, which on paper is more than the 3,300mAh battery in the OnePlus 5. But the real-life results can be very different. We have seen smartphones with bigger battery lose out to rivals with smaller battery if the screen resolution is high or software is not optimised.

Dual Cameras

Huawei is one of the first companies in the Android ecosystem to offer dual cameras. The Honor 8 Pro also comes with a dual camera setup too. There is a 12-megapixel RGB sensor and a 12-megapixel monochrome sensor. It combines output from both sensors to produce high quality shots. The OnePlus 5 is also a dual camera smartphone and includes a 16-megapixel and an additional 20-megapixel camera. The camera performance in the OnePlus 5 has been a bit of a letdown so far and several updates have been rolled out so far to improve the camera algorithm.